What we found when we mystery-shopped thought leadership newsletters

July 22, 2015 Resources

We set one of our analysts the task of signing up for messages – newsletters, alerts, updates, and such – about thought leadership from some of the world’s leading consulting firms and then sitting back and waiting to see what happened next.

To mask his identity – partly because we wanted him to play the role of mystery shopper, but also because we were slightly nervous about what might happen next and so needed an email address we could delete if we were inundated – we gave our analyst an alias: Judy Bright. We’re reasonably confident that this is the first time a man has ever posed as a woman in order to analyse the way consulting firms communicate about their thought leadership, and that’s something about which we’re quietly proud.

We did it because we were interested in the experience of both signing up for and receiving messages about thought leadership. More specifically, we were interested in what that experience told us about individual consulting firms, not only where thought leadership was concerned, but also more generally. After all, as our analyst himself puts it later in this report, “Were I not actually working with these firms, these newsletters could well be my closest contact with them.” And that makes them pretty important.

This, then, is his account of the experience.

Read more: Source for Consulting